Arabic-Indic Numeral Shaping in IE11

Details

Steps to reproduce

This is an issue report to IE11 which was reported in older IEs in Issue #107379.

IE used to shape the numbers using native numerals such as Arabic-Indic based on the Windows “Use Native Digit” option setting of Regional format. But the recent IEs don’t. Arabic users see Arabic numbers on a HTML page where Arabic-Indic numerals must appear.

We tested the following IEs behavior on Windows with Arabic(U.A.E) system and user locale setting.

Please see the attachments below:
Testcase: numeral.html
Result with Use Native Digit: Context: bidi_numeral_context.png
Result with Use Native Digit: National: bidi_numeral_national.png

The result shows IE is loosing the native numeral shaping functionality as its version increases. This is a regression for Arabic users, particularly a big impact for governmental users. There is no perfect way to workaround this issue in the application developer side.

The native number shaping based on the OS setting needs to be supported in the latest document mode.

This kind of additional IE option setting is also able to save Arabic users.

Using the compatibility view setting or Enterprise mode to force IE work in older document mode doesn’t help as the latest HTML/Javascript may not work with the older document mode.

Using a special font having native numeral glyph cannot be a perfect solution either. It always replaces the numbers on the page if applied. In Arabic, numbers shall be rendered in Arabic or Arabic-Indic numerals depending on the context (how numbers appears in a text.

As of this update, IE and Edge are the only certified browsers for our business application for Arabic customers.

Previous releases of our products supported older versions of IE which worked just fine, but the latest release supports only IE11 and Edge for Arabic customers. If the issue is not fixed by Microsoft, we are not able to sell it in Arabic countries as it is a critical problem for business applications like ours, and we are forced to work with Mozilla and/or Google to possibly switch to Firefox and/or Chrome and de-support IE/Edge.

This is actually a very basic requirement in any business applications in Arabic countries.

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